The point of reading and studying literature is that you will have a body of great things in your mind that will be a resource for you for the rest of your life. At the heart of the Main Program is Seminar, where students encounter great works of classical and modern literature. We read what Charlotte Mason called living books: beautifully told stories that have shaped our history and can be read and reread for pleasure and benefit throughout one’s whole life. The readings in the first year primarily concern war, justice, and the meaning of home. The readings in the second year take up the themes of journeying, self-discovery, and friendship. We finish with Annie Dillard’s The Living, a novel about the history of Fairhaven itself.
Year A: War, Slavery, and Place
- Homer – The Iliad
- Plato – Meno
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- William Faulkner – The Unvanquished
- Wendell Berry – Hannah Coulter
- Marilynne Robinson – Gilead
- Virgil – The Georgics
- Annie Dillard – The Writing Life
- Secondary Readings:
- Shakespeare – Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony & Cleopatra
- Heidi Bohan – The People of Cascadia
- Charles Mann – 1491
- C.S. Lewis – Till We Have Faces
Year B: Journeys
- Homer – The Odyssey
- The Journals of Lewis & Clark
- Mark Twain – Tom Sawyer
- Mark Twain – Huckleberry Finn
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X
- Virgil – The Aeneid
- Wendell Berry – What Are People For?
- Annie Dillard – The Living
- Secondary Readings:
- Shakespeare – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Winter’s Tale, and Hamlet
- Patrick Leigh Fermor – A Time of Gifts
- Ernst Gombrich – The Story of Art
- George Stewart – Names on the Land
- Francis Parkman – The Oregon Trail
Thought is neither instant nor noisy… It thrives best in solitude, in quiet, and in the company of the past, the great community of human experience.
Wallace Stegner